I have been watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend since mid-season 2, and to say that this show felt different from the beginning is an understatement. I saw the show on Netflix and decided to start watching it without really knowing the premise other than what the title was. I expected a show that was light-hearted and a little dramatic and showed us a slightly unlikable but ultimately redeemable heroine. I was right, but just not in the way I thought I would be. From the second episode when Rebecca utters the words “exeunt pursued by a bear” to excuse herself from an awkward social situation I was hooked. The hilarious and on-the-nose musical numbers and feminist meta were simply added bonuses; however, as the story progressed I was so much more excited as a PhD candidate in Counseling Psychology to see that this was going somewhere unheard of in network television land. We were finally going to see a realistic portrayal of mental illness on television in the form of a well-written, multi-dimensional female character.
Now, here we are in season three, waiting for the penultimate game changing moment where our favorite “crazy ex” finally starts unpacking some serious childhood trauma and emotional issues. The subject of Rebecca’s diagnosis is exciting for me as a mental health professional, and while I believe that the diagnosis will lean a certain way based off of what we’ve been shown and the research that I know Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna have done, I want to go a step further by unpacking some of the things about Rebecca’s history that we as an audience should keep in mind as we go through this journey with these characters.
1) First and foremost, there is a psychological history surrounding certain disorders being diagnosed in women and not men due to psychology’s own sordid history of misogyny and victim blaming. My personal believe is that we will see Rebecca come away with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Some of the symptoms of BPD are:
- underdeveloped self-identity
- dissociative states
- chronic feelings of emptiness
- compromised ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others
- history of unstable relationships
- anxiety, worry, and panic
- frequent mood changes
- fears of rejection and abandonment
-risky sexual behavior
- substance abuse
Sound like our Rebecca yet?
However, BPD is often diagnosed disproportionately in women. Several feminists would argue that this is due to a patriarchal history of pathologizing women’s emotional states in reaction to severe traumatic experiences. I’m not saying this is a legitimate argument against BPD, simply that it is something to keep in mind if this is Rebecca’s eventual diagnosis. This segues me into my next point.
2) Trauma affects its victims in various ways and several of the symptoms we see in BPD are also symptoms commonly seen in various trauma disorders. They’re obviously different in several aspects, but there is some overlap. Rebecca is no stranger to trauma. She has trauma from the abandonment she experienced at the hand of her father, the controlling and abusive relationship she has with her mother, and the show even hints at generational trauma that Rebecca might identify with in relation to her religious identity. Her symptomology and behaviors show us someone who is trying to cope with a traumatic history that we might have only scratched the surface of as an audience. Rebecca is not a reliable narrator and there is so much about her as a character that she keeps hidden from us as an audience because she denies it about herself.
3) Finally, we need to remind ourselves that while Rebecca’s actions (especially in the latest episode) are not excusable, she is not the only guilty party in this narrative. Just like in real life, every player in this story has done something to enable or reinforce Rebecca’s behavior at some point or another (except for maybe White Josh and Heather). Furthermore, there are a lot of things about the other characters that we still have unanswered questions to that I think will play a larger role at some point in the storyline of the show, specifically Josh. We still do not know what he was doing in New York, why he decided to move back to West Covina, why he’s afraid of commitment, and why he also has issues with his self-image. Josh as a character could be seen as an archetype of the traditional male rom-com lead; however, he’s not. He’s a dynamic character that we simply have not been shown every side of yet because the story POV has been so focused on him as an ideal of Rebecca’s solution to her problems. We could write him off as a product of the socialization of men in Western culture; he’s immature, he’s fickle, he can’t commit, he allows himself to be infantilized by his parents and friends, but this show and its characters are the brainchild of two very smart women who have done their research. Josh Chan has his own history as a character that I fully believe we will delve deeper into as this thesis on the idea of the “crazy ex-girlfriend” is unraveled.
4) The female friendships within the show paint us a bigger picture of the overall idea of what we should be learning from each episode. Female friendships are weird, but rewarding. We are socialized to be polite and submissive or catty and competitive. At different times within the show’s narrative all of the female friendships grow and evolve into each of these stereotypes, and what we can glean from that is that women are actually complex and human. Women and their relationships to each other are not as clearly defined as media wants us to believe, even feminist media. While it’s ideal to think that women should all support each other or its stereotypical to think that women all hate each other, the truth is that we are all complex and human and our relationships as women are consistently changing. Furthermore, these concepts of competition or support would not really be discussed in relation to mens’ friendships because men as characters are allowed to be dynamic and exist as singular entities, which is the point. Audiences should begin to allow female characters to be complex and growing and changing without vilifying them for having interpersonal conflicts in the same way they allow male characters to do the same.
I honestly could write an entire dissertation on this show and the intricacies of its portrayal of mental health and the deconstruction of the archetype of the crazy ex. It’s brilliant and original and important. Art is supposed to say something, and for the first time in a long time the idea of a television show as a think piece on American culture is true again. Plus there’s songs! Bloom and McKenna have outdone themselves in putting a new-wave feminist perspective on these issues and I will go to my grave singing the praises of such a brilliant subversion of everything modern media tells us we should be as women.
